The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (Incerto, #2)

by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Simply, things that move, and therefore require knowledge, do not usually have experts, while things that don’t move seem to have some experts. In other words, professions that deal with the future and base their studies on the nonrepeatable past have an expert problem (with the exception of the weather and businesses involving short-term physical processes, not socioeconomic ones). I am not saying that no one who deals with the future provides any valuable information (as I pointed out earlier, newspapers can predict theater opening hours rather well), but rather that those who provide no tangible added value are generally dealing with the future. Another way to see it is that things that move are often Black Swan–prone. Experts are narrowly focused persons who need to “tunnel.” In situations where tunneling is safe, because Black Swans are not consequential, the expert will do well.